needed to make another post because i got to testing this out and it seems that after i get to azoth there's nothing more to do?
or am i just missing some steps?

Right. Azoth is where it stops right now. The crystal models and textures are ready, but I still have to create the jars to grow them in. The next steps will be creating the alchemical seed for the different metals, putting the seed in the jars, adding the azoth and watching the crystals grow on the seeds. When the crystals are done, you remove them from the jar and add them to a barrel of lava to create an actual block of ore.

Chapter 1 (Wood)
If you start on an Easy map, then you'll start skip to Chapter 2.

You'll start with a tree and some dirt. Your first bits of wood should go towards making a crafting table and then a few crooks. Using a crook to break leaves means you'll get more saplings. Your second tree will give you enough would to make a barrel or two. A barrel allows you to compost saplings to make more dirt, or place it outdoors and you can catch rainwater with it.

When you have a fair amount of dirt you can make a furnace using eight pieces of it. This will allow you to cook sticks into ash. You can use ash to make trees and crops grow faster. It's not as good as bonemeal, but it helps with the boredom.

Eventually you'll want to make a sieve and mesh so that you can move to the next chapter. Both can be made of wood, but a silk mesh is preferable. If you have enough would, a monster farm can be very profitable at this stage, but it can be very difficult to automate without a bucket. Also, zombie flesh will cause compost to become coarse dirt

If you sift dirt, you will find some tiny stones. The stones aren't much, but they can add up to cobblestone blocks. A wooden hammer will break cobblestone into gravel, sand, and dust. Dust can be mixed with a barrel of water to create clay.

Clay can be mixed with bonemeal and ash to create a much harder and water-tight type of clay called porcelain. Porcelain clay, once it is molded and fired can be used for buckets or a crucible, which is the key to the next chapter.

Once you have successfully created a crucible, place something hot under it. You can do this with a torch, a burning furnace, a bit of lava or an actual flame. Add cobblestone to the crucible and wait. Once you have given enough of both stone and time, you then can use a bucket to extract some lava.

Lava from a crucible, and rainwater from a barrel will allow the construction of a cobblestone generator.

Chapter 2 (Stone)

Now that you have a cobblestone generator, you can begin to build up a surplus of stone materials but metals remain rare. Zombies will occasionally drop iron ingots when killed by a player or you can sift gravel to get rust. Purifying rust in a furnace will also give you an ingot of iron.

At this point you'll probably want to set up some farms, but for that you'll need some plants to get you started. Zombies drop potatoes and carrots, creepers drop cactus when killed by a player, sugarcane be found while fishing.

A few iron bars can be used to make shears which can greatly speed up dirt production. Composting leaf blocks allows the creation of podzol and sifting them allows you to gain saplings for new types of trees. If you didn't start with oak trees then getting an oak sapling can be very useful because apples are a very welcome bonus when food is scarce.

Eventually you'll want to make your way to the nether. Use crucibles to create lava. You can build a frame of dirt and create your nether portal frame layer by layer using alternating buckets of lava and water. Another option is to make a barrel of a non-flammable material like glass or stone which will allow you to make obsidian blocks. Simply add a bucket of lava to your barrel and shift+click a bucket of water on top. It's messy, but very effective.

Chapter 3 (Hell)

Now that you're in the nether you'll need to exercise caution! Any block where the top surface is not a slab or a transparent block like glass will potentially allow ghasts to spawn. A ghast in a void nether world is a true nightmare to deal with!

Build out from your portal at least 25 blocks, but make sure that you control the spawning of mobs as you go or recovery can become very very difficult. Make a small room, at least 7 x 7 x 7 blocks in size and remember to spawn-proof the ceiling. When you get far enough away from the room zombie pigmen will spawn, which is a good source of gold but not what you want. Rarely, a ghast will appear inside the room. When you have a ghast tear and eight gold bars, head back through the portal.

On the other side, use the gold to make a golden apple. Then find two empty barrels. Into one barrel, put the golden apple and into the other put the ghast tear. Finish filling the barrels with whatever random compost ingredients you have available but be wary of zombie flesh. The golden apple will cause the compost to become grass and the ghast tear will become mycelium. I suggest taking them out of the barrels and giving each their own area to spread out.

You can use bonemeal on the grass to grow flowers, or create tall grass which allows you to gain seeds of wheat. The mycelium can be sifted to gain spores. The fastest way to pick up mycelium is with a shovel enchanted with silk touch, but if you are patient then you can leave dirt inside a barrel and the mycelium will grow inside the barrel allowing you to pick it up. Spores can be added to water to create witchwater, or you can feed them to a cow to transform them into mooshrooms. Mycelium next to water or exposed to rain will spontaneously sprout mushrooms too, which can be a good source of compostable materials. The same effect occurs occasionally with cobblestone, only it generates moss instead.

Witchwater, once unlocked, has several powerful uses. Firstly, it can be mixed with sand to create soul sand. Soulsand can be sifted to gain netherwart, which is required for many powerful potions. Also, any monster that touches witchwater will have it's powers amplified. Most neutral or good creatures will die when they touch it, but a few will undergo terrible and dangerous mutations. Witchwater also has a very dramatic reaction to metals, corroding them away until only the purest metallic salts remain.

These salts seem to have unexpected curative powers though. They can be mixed with water and the resulting elixir can be consumed to cure seemingly any poison or illness. It even seems to speed the healing of physical injuries.

Chapter 4 (Transformation)

Now that you have netherwart, you can attempt to cure a zombie of it's affliction. While the azoth elixir has no effect, a potion of weakness combined with a golden apple will drive the curse from the zombie and restore his sanity. A cured villager makes an excellent companion.

Your new friend seems to have an uncanny gift for discovering emeralds laying around, which he will happily give you in exchange for some random things you have lying around.

After some meditation on the nature of these jewels, you think there might be a way to convert them into a more durable form. It's a grizzly and dangerous business, but the results are well worth it.

You begin by severing the head from the body of one of your enemies. That head, once placed in a barrel of water to soak for a time, will become laden with a curious slime which can dissolve away impurities in gemstones. Add charcoal as a carbon source and squid ink to bind it. Then apply this black slime to an emerald to begin the transmutation. The black shell quickly becomes harder than steel and impossible to work with. It must be imploded off! You accomplish this by making a hollow obsidian cube with only the top open. Inside you drop the black emeralds and above them you place a block of TNT. When the TNT activates, it will fall into the hollow. Quickly place another block above the emeralds so that they are enclosed on all six sides! If you've done it correctly, then the emeralds that were able to withstand the blast will be revealed to be diamonds of the highest quality and clarity.

Further experiments with the black slime reveal another interesting property. When heated in a furnace it becomes a potent fuel source, nearly identical to coal mined from the earth.

sucks to hear that man but i know how it go's i had to give up a game that i created myself because of work/family/money so i do understand
are you reserving the rights to this? or are you letting it get passed over to another person that has the time to put into it?

just curious what are your monthly expenses?

Student loans, car payment, car insurance, health insurance for me and my wife, phone, food, our split of rent/power/water/garbage/internet (which could be a lot higher, but we don't live alone). It comes out to, I don't know... $2000 or so? We try to keep non-fixed expenses low since I'm not generating much income and I literally haven't spent any money on anything fun since March. Unless you count fish food as an entertainment expense.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet about IP rights. I have no problem letting someone else maintain my code, but it's only a matter of time until somebody wants to make an "Ex Nihilo 3" and break away from my legacy. I would like the option to turn these mechanics into a stand-alone game in the future if I decide to do that.

My tentative position about maintaining the mod is "come talk to me about it". I will most likely allow updating to new versions, bug fixing, porting to new platforms and there is always the option of creating new mods inspired by mine that may or may not be extremely and uncomfortably close to mine in functionality.

If you're curious what took so long, there was a really annoying series of events that occurred.

Firstly, I put off this particular update as long as I could because Forge for 1.8 didn't support custom fluids. After asking around and even talking to Lex Manos, nobody had any idea when that support was going to get added. Apparently the person who was supposed to be working on that had vanished without talking to anyone.

Eventually I decided that I didn't want to wait anymore, so I wrote my own fluid rendering code. It wasn't the most fun thing to work on, but I spent about week or so building and tweaking it. When it was finally done, guess what had happened? If you guessed, "Fry reappeared, rewrote the Forge fluid rendering system and broke the code that you just spent a week on..." well, you should win a prize or something. So I stripped out my custom code and rewrote my fluids to use the new Forge rendering instead. Lots of wasted effort there.

So, that was about half of the issue. The other half was that I had another opportunity fall into my lap to back to full time software development. I promised you guys that I would use my own savings to finish Ex Nihilo 2 and I still plan to do that, but it's been a few months now and those savings are quite a bit smaller then they were in April. This made me take a good long look at Minecraft modding and what I've accomplished so far.

I don't think there is really any hope of getting any combination of methods to support even a quarter of my expenses. I tried the Kickstarter thing, and that didn't work. I've been trying the Curse/Patreon/Paypal thing, and it's not working either. At this point I just have to accept the results of this experiment. Still, its a really bitter truth, and that combined with the Forge stuff has left me really unmotivated.

Long story short, I'm going to be finishing up a few more things, like creating ores from azoth, and then I'll probably be going into semi-retirement. I have a few months left before I'm in real danger of running out of funds so I'm going to use that time to work on my own game that I've been designing while I still have the opportunity to do it. I'll fix bugs that crop up on the 1.8 version when I can but I don't plan to design any new features and the 1.8 -> 1.9 update is completely up in the air.

I wish I had better news. I'll get a new update out as soon as I can and I'll hopefully have a better grasp on my future plans then.

"* How to balance crucibles better for mod packs that are not skyblock? Possibly make them crack and need repairs?"
make tiers for them, add support for automation of it( ex: a output for the lava on a side or a tool that let's you chose the output for lava), have them crack and spill out their liquid using a random tick chance after x uses with a increasing x% for this to happen with each use after x uses (have this linked to a config for skyblock and non skyblock)

"* The current recipes for sieves are: dirt to stones, gravel to flint, soul sand to nether quartz. What other recipes are there that make sense and are useful, but not overpowered?"

block of coal>diamond shards/ assorted minerals/coal dust or carbon dust witch is from another mod (this is balanced imo because in a skyblock the only way to obtain coal if from killing wither skeletons)
podzol>mushrooms/ leaves or dead and or dry leaves/slik worm
cactus>cactus juice and or water/thorns
if better mesh's are added there' will be alot more that make sense

suggestions:

more crooks with better durability, more mesh's with better durability, have sieve's take mesh input from side and block input from top(for use with hoppers ect.), let mesh's stack to 16 atleast, add a new mechanic to sieves added weight blocks that can fall will increase the weight put on the item being sieved // making it posable to sieve more dense blocks ///can use gravle sand and anvil //// make weaker sieves break with the added weight and introduce better sieves stone/iron ect., add nei custom crafting support (for sieves and crucible ect.)

fix:
odd crash
missing texture on dirt furnace causes a crash when optifine is installed (on some client's there's a texture but not on mine)

Awesome. Working on the last bits and pieces that I need to build the alchemy system right now. I'm going to put off the next update until metal transmutation is working. I'll probably put a video up on YouTube explaining it all too.

The json files can be named whatever you want. You can have as many of them as you want. I imagined having a list of json files for other mods available so you can just download one for the mod you want and drop it in the folder.

To reference blocks and items outside of vanilla, you have to find the mod id for that mod. For example, mine is exnihilo2. My blocks are "exnihilo2:block_name". The mod id will be different for every mod. You should be able to find it by launching the game, going into the 'Mods' menu from the title screen and scrolling down to the mod you are looking for. After that, you have to find the right unlocalized block or item name. There might be an easier way to do this (probably using NEI), but for that I usually look for a .lang file embedded in the mod jar file and it should list the all the items and blocks. Items will be prefixed with 'item.' and blocks will have 'tile.'.

And I do plan on being adding the ability to get all the new 1.8 blocks and items in one way or another.

This one adds most of the plant life from vanilla. You can get new saplings by sifting leaf blocks, cactus from killing creepers, sugarcane from fishing, and both pumpkins and melons from breaking grass. Also, you can get chunks of rust from sifting gravel which can be cooked into iron ingots. The different metal salt crystals are in the game but you can't get them legitimately or use them for anything yet. Feel free to spawn them in and let me know how they look though.

Alchemy is getting closer. I need to get witchwater working, but fluid rendering is currently disabled in 1.8 so I have to write my own rendering code which is going to take some time. I'm hoping to have the alchemy system fully functional in the next update though.

The 'sift leaf blocks for new saplings' thing will most likely not be sticking around, but I put it in there so that people can get the other saplings until I can decide on a more permanent mechanic for it. I also need to figure out a good way to get nether wart into the game.

Since everyone started moving to curseforge, they don't say what version of forge their mods need. What version of forge does Ex Nihilo 1.38-40 need? I'm using 10.13.2.1291 and getting a crash due to barrels. I'm afraid it needs a version of forge with the fluid changes, but that'll break other mods I need. If so, what version of Ex Nihilo can I downgrade to?

That is a very good point. The latest builds (1.38-40 & 1.38-41) are definitely built using Forge 10.13.3.1408. Prior to that is a little murky. The update in the source code happened on May 20th. Before that date they were built using Forge 10.13.2.1291, so anything before that should work fine for you. I would suggest trying 1.38-36.